“Nobody actually uses the rules for traveling, man. They fucking suck.”

They were absolutely right. They do suck.

When I have DM’d there’s often a difference between the intended difficulty of an encounter I create versus how it actually works out in play.

Players are allowed to flee. Enemies are allowed to mock them and walk away.

I’m not sure why basically ever single discussion I ever see about GMing seems to live in this world where the only options in combat is “PCs die or NPCs die”, and the only workaround is to pick and choose when you’re playing a probability game.

iamthetot

would you be okay with a player lying (fudging) a dice result to facilitate a result that they found more fun?

Thank you. No GM is going to accept their players declaring a bad roll to be a good one, instead. Cheating players is one of the more common GM complaints. I’m not sure why GMs seem to think that’s a one-way street.

Tell your players they can also create part of the world. If a player wants to jump up, grab the chandelier and swing towards the enemies, then there’s now a chandelier there. They don’t have to ask if one is there first.

And print out a long list of names and a long list of quirks (like “gorgeous”, "drunk ", “depressed”, “freckled”, “educated”, “short-tempered”, etc.)
Pick a name and 2+ quirks for every NPC they encounter, to give them more than “he’s the shopkeeper” to play off of.
You can make similar lists for villages you didn’t plan out, spaceships, etc. depending on the setting.

I did not attack your character.

Change or fudge enough rules and you’re basically playing a different game.

No time constraints? Now the GM has less levers to pull on to make choices feel meaningful.

Not tracking rations? Then there’s nothing stopping the players from travelling back to town to rest after every encounter.

Lots of game rules feel “less fun” in the moment but the alternative is constantly playing rocket tag because now fights don’t feel consequential unless player death is on the line - and that’s an easy line to accidentally cross. And then you end up fudging rolls to balance encounters.

But you wouldn’t need to make individual encounters so hard in the first place if pc death isn’t the only negative consequence on the table.

There are other games than DND. Play more of them and steal ideas from them.

System dependant, surely.

I was thinking and trying to come to with something and I realized that I never got advice.

My path as a DM was essentially all “jump in and learn to swim”.

First from the old red box an uncle left behind when he moved, trying to figure it out (and bashing my face into thac0 until giving up for years).

Then, when I got fed up with the first DM I played under, I said “fuck it”, then finally figured thac0 out enough to run some d&d for friends, and decided I liked the mishmash my first DM used that was a gurps/d&d/marvel heroes/call of Cthulu abomination. I took the things I liked that he did, rejected what sucked for me, then gradually grafted on my own home brew stuff.

My group vastly preferred the near future, science fantasy setting I cooked up to standard d&d, so that was what mostly got played over the years until I essentially retired from running games (tried to run some here and there, with varying degrees of flake leading to aborted games).

So I never got advice. What I got was players, friends, giving me shit when things sucked and helping me cook shit up to fix what was broken. I call it “my” system, but the mechanics that weren’t lifted from established systems then adapted are only maybe 90% mine. Even the ones I wholly cooked up got adjusted over time by my friends input.

My best friend completely designed two magic “schools”, and had a major hand in coming up with racial abilities for our weird-ass wants.

And I think that’s the advice I got indirectly. Make the game, whatever system it is, a thing of creativity and fun. The system doesn’t fucking matter. The setting isn’t important. The people are. Time and time again, my best shit as a DM wouldn’t have happened without everyone being fully engaged, fully free to pull shit out of their ear and see what happened.

It’s the advice I tend to give when asked. And it isn’t just rule of cool writ long winded, because you don’t actually have to do that for an engaging table. You can RAWdog the fuck out of dice and rules as long as players and DM are invested in mutual enjoyment.

Yeah, it is probably important in WH40K more than D&D. At least from what I have seen of the game when I would go to the local game shop.